English World-Wide - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2009

Similarities of the phraseology of institutionalized second language varieties and foreign learner varieties have gone almost completely unnoticed so far. In this paper, different types of co-selection phenomena are examined across ESL and EFL varieties on the basis of the ICE-corpora of Kenyan, Indian, Singaporean, and Jamaican English and of ICLE, the International Corpus of Learner English. Among the features investigated are the use of competing collocations such as play a role and play a part, the noun complementation of collocations (HAVE + INTENTION + of -ing vs. to + infinitive), and non-L1 (or “new”) prepositional verbs such as comprise of, demand for or emphasize on. The exploration shows that many co-selection phenomena do indeed recur not only across individual institutionalized L2 varieties but also across the two variety types. Certain kinds of language-internal irregularities in the phraseology of Standard English are shown to be a major reason for the observed parallels

The present paper investigates the strength of verb-construction associations across various New Englishes on the basis of comparable corpora. In contrast to previous studies into verb complementation in New Englishes, we start off from three basic constructions in English — the intransitive, the monotransitive and the ditransitive construction — and analyse the co-occurrences of the three constructions and a wide range of verbs. The present study is based on the Hong Kong, the Indian, and the Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) because the three varieties represent markedly different stages in the process of the evolution of New Englishes with British English as the historical input variety. Our quantitative analysis includes multiple distinctive collexeme analyses for the different varieties. The results show, inter alia, that, firstly, processes of structural nativisation of New Englishes can also be observed at the level of verb-construction associations, which can be subsumed under the notion of “collostructional nativisation”, and that, secondly, there are identifiable intervarietal differences between British English and New Englishes as well as between individual New Englishes. In general, there is a correlation between the evolutionary stage of a New English variety and its collostructional nativisation: The more advanced a New English variety is in the developmental cycle, the more dissimilar its collostructional preferences are to British English.

This paper examines the use of Igbo English, one of the ethnic varieties of Nigerian English, in the Nigerian video film. By Nigerian video film, we mean video films produced in, and/or about Nigeria in English as opposed to those produced in Nigerian indigenous languages which are variously known as Igbo video films, Yoruba video films, or Edo video films, among others. The data for this study come from a random selection from video films produced in Nigeria between 2003 and 2006. In all the films studied, it is observed that Igbo English is essentially the medium of communication. Igbo English is one of the three major ethnic varieties of Nigerian English and is characterized by the fact that, while the vocabulary is mostly English, the sentence pattern is essentially Igbo. The choice of Igbo English as the medium for the films seems to be part of the efforts by the producers to retain, as much as possible, the “Nigerianness” of the films, which inevitably have to be produced in English to accommodate the international audience. This study observes that Igbo English, as used in the films studied, manifests itself in four forms: Igbo English proper, composed of English vocabulary in Igbo sentence structure; Engligbo, a form of code-mixing that is almost a fifty-fifty blend of English and Igbo; translation, in which Igbo idiomatic and other rhetorical expressions are transferred literally into English; and errors induced by the influence of the mother tongue (Igbo) on English.

This article investigates quotative use in American English in apparent and real time. The use of quotative be like, go and say in a corpus of conversation in American English dating 2004 / 2005 is compared with use in a similar corpus dating 1995 / 1996 (Barbieri 2007). Findings show that in present-day American English be like is the favorite choice for all speakers below age 40, and is extremely popular among young teenagers. The real time comparison reveals that speakers who in the mid-1990s were in their teens to mid-20s have not only maintained, but considerably increased use of be like over time; women aged 27–40 have also maintained use of be like over time. Such findings provide evidence of generational change, as well as of “lifespan change” (Sankoff 2005). Overall, the present findings indicate that be like is a true case of change in progress — a change still led by women; however they do not point to one particular type of change, suggesting that generational and communal change may operate simultaneously in the advancement of change.